Generation Is Not Delivery: The Grid Problem Behind Decarbonisation

Okay.

Are we reaching a point where building more renewables without fixing the grid delivers diminishing climate returns?

I would say if you continue just to build more renewables without tackling the grid, of course you spend a lot of money and then you have to curtail the renewable generation at a certain point of time because you had too much, the grid cannot take it and cannot deliver it to the consumer.

So of course then you have no economic benefit of doing so.

So you have to have a synchronized planning.

to be able to achieve what we want to achieve, actually, to change fundamentally the energy system, to carry more energy costs than to have an energy system that is based on fossil fuels.

When the grid can't keep pace, where does that pain show up first? Is it emissions? Is it prices? Is it reliability? Investment? Somewhere else? Tom, I think it's all of the data, actually.

Points everywhere.

But I think the one that is seen now in many countries that you have tens of gigawatts of applications where they want to connect to the grid.

This is, of course, a big pain point where it could be a data center, it can be an industry, it can be a fleet of vehicles that wants to connect to the grid and get energy through electrons that is simply not also positively within time.

So you have the risk of having, of course, a more renewable energy or any energy source, could be nuclear as well, at the grid, but not the grid that is ready to receive it in an effective way.

And of course, that is the key challenge we as a society, especially

here in Europe.

So would you say grids are becoming an industrial competitiveness issue as much as an energy issue? Absolutely.

I believe so.

I mean, fundamentally, if you take Australia, it's a very interesting case, actually.

And they are managing to add a lot of solar, but also wind into the energy system to be cleaner, but also to have homegrown energy.

to be resilient in terms of the energy source.

And they are managing the complexity that comes with it.

We have also to be clear, renewable energy is going to have less intermittency in the grid, and that has to be managed.

Thereby, they are ending a lot of battery energy storage so they can manage the fluctuation and still run a grid that is renewable.

And Australia is managing this, and they are moving very fast, I must say.

Of course, it's very expensive in the transition.

When you still have the old way of doing things and you're adding the new way in the transition.

And this is where we as a consumer, we see some pain points on industries that in the transition period, it will be a bit expensive.